I hope that I’m not the only person who is concerned that the 64-bit only restriction of SharePoint 2010 will put a serious crimp on people who learn new technology by installing it in VM’s on their laptop (or laptop + external drive).
In the current bad economy, I don’t know of many developers who are ditching (or can afford to ditch) their 32-bit laptops for 64-bit laptops just so they can be prepared to install and run SharePoint 2010 in a virtual machine when it makes its debut in October.
How are we supposed to learn SP 2010 at workshops and seminars or give demonstrations to users groups if we cannot do so on our existing 32-bit laptop investments? I believe there will be a serious decline in developers willing to learn SharePoint 2010 with such a high barrier to entry.
Sure, there will be virtual labs, but for me, installing and configuring SharePoint from scratch in a VM is one of the best ways to learn “What Mother [Microsoft] Didn’t Tell You About Installing And Running SharePoint 2010.” Using VMWare Workstation 6.5.2, I can use Snapshots to fork in multiple directions (e.g., WSS-only or WSS+MOSS).
I have plenty of RAM on my existing laptop (4GB) to run a 1024KB virtual machine consisting of Windows Server 2008 R1, SQL Server 2008 SP1, and SharePoint 2007 SP1, so why should I pitch that fairly new laptop in the trash and buy a new one just to be able to run SharePoint 2010 and Windows Server 2008 R2?
I agree with ‘fredmorrison’ completely. Microsoft should have provided some way out thinking about we developers who cannot go for new hardware/software so easily.
They should provide a 64 bit VPC which we can run on our 32 bit machines.
Wow,
If anyone can create a 64 bit hardware emulator that will run on a 32 bit machine, that would be incredible! (If not nye impossible…)
Dave
I agree completely with this comment. And not only to developers! Think about companies now. Do they need to scrap all their server architecture, with thousands of $ or £ or EUR invested on them… just to upgrade a tool that most of them do not care about?
There are a lot of Sharepoint fanatics out there, but there are going to be a lot more business opportunities lost because of all the costs attached to this upgrade.
I’m a Sharepoint architect and I can assure you that we are going to lose more businesses and leads with this than ever before. Companies are not willing to spend all that huge amount of money in order to keep up to date with a tool that sometimes is not business critical. And what is business critical, the 2007 version is already able to provide it.
This requirement seriously bothers me too! First of all, SharePoint is a website… and I don’t understand why there are such steep requirements for a f-in website.
Second of all, this smells like Microsoft’s vendor lock-in strategy to me. Require people to buy 64 bit version of server and sql 2008 because now they need it for SharePoint! It’s an underhanded tactic from le Microsoft again!
Seriously, I’m going to become an Open source developer. This shit is just too much.
Although I see your points, I have had a Core 2 Duo laptop for 2+ years. It’s 64 bit. Even my parents have 64 bit processors. A robust customized implementation of MOSS 2007 should even be installed on 64 bit for best performance… I am not surprised that this is the case.
But remember.. think of the business case. Clients can probably get away with MOSS for quite a few more years. It really works well depending on the need. I still have a few SPS 2003 systems running that work great. Depends on the need.
And for the comment saying it’s “Just a website”, your so wrong.. if you actually use the Enterprise featuers, Forms Server, Excel Services, Office Web Services…. Search… There is a lot going on under the hood in something secure and manageable by non developers when set up…
If you only use the basics, use WSS 3. It’s free and you can still make workflows.